And it is this which will preserve to love its excitement, even when the animal habits—with pursuit on one side and flight on the other—have gradually ceased. Conflict and the intoxication of victory will always form a part of the vital stimulation and pleasurable emotion of love,—but they will be removed to a higher plane. Man’s forward rush to win a woman who perhaps would not otherwise have remarked him; woman’s turning aside to egg the man on, or else to defend in some measure the independent decision of her feelings, will be transformed by the desire of each to wait until the other has chosen. The erotic tension will then be released in the contest for the most refined expressions of sympathy, the most convincing assurances of comprehension, the most rapidly vibrating sensitiveness to the other’s moods, the fullest communication of confidence. Victory will mean a constantly deeper penetration into the other’s nature, an ever richer fulness and joy in the communication of one’s own; a constantly growing faith as regards what is mysterious, and a like gratitude for what is revealed. The stimulation will be renewed daily in moods the transitions of which are as imperceptible as those of the evening sky from the reddest gold to the purest white; in the border lines of sympathy and antipathy, now fine as a straw, now broad as a river. It will be renewed through the test of innumerable uniting and repellent emotions, as rapidly and irrevocably decisive as the fall of a star in space, or of a silver piece in the river. And this tension of married life will not be relaxed as now by the puffed-up arrogance of proprietorship on the part of the man or by dull complaisance on that of the woman. Since all sense of happiness is connected with the exertion of force to attain an end and with the equilibrium that results from its attainment, it has been the misfortune of love that courtship has absorbed all the tension, and married life the subsequent equilibrium. Only the sense of impending loss—through life or through death—has, as a rule, evoked a new spiritual tension. This, for reasons mentioned above, has especially concerned the husband. Wives have often suffered long from the self-satisfied comfort of the daily life of marriage before they have resigned the peace of consummation, the equilibrium without movement, which was their dream of happiness. But now women will no longer resign, nor allow themselves to be cheated of life. More and more their demand for a new love becomes one with the demand for a new marriage, the chief value of which will not, as now, consist in “security and calm.”